This short video shows you how to use Tendenci's Spaces feature to add dynamic content to your homepage from your events, news, articles, sponsors and other site modules.

Create Dynamic Websites with Tendenci Spaces

In this video I'm going to talk a little bit more about customizing your Tendenci Community homepage template and we're going to talk about Spaces. Inside different templates we have a feature in Tendenci called a Space - these are editable content boxes with some formatting in the back end that allow you to do things like add your news, your upcoming events dynamically, have sponsors and rotators come in.

So as you see me mouse over these different content boxes you're seeing "Space 2," "Edit Space 1," here's "Edit Space Sidebar." Those are how you find the Spaces. And when you click on the links to edit them you'll see the Space 3 Content options come up. You'll have a drop down menu where you can have nothing in this area, in this case it allows a sponsor list or you can pull in a single event or custom Boxes.

Boxes are very much like spaces but they are a little more flexible and they can go anywhere in your site, whereas spaces are typically only on the homepage and on your internal page sidebars. So you can see where we have the sponsor list you can also configure the number of stories for sponsors so I can have one sponsor box down there, I can have up to 9. If I push nothing and update it, I'll show you what happens. So we've updated it and now you see this space is gone and the footer has been moved up.

So that space is actually gone, however you can still go and edit it and add it back if you want by going to your admin bar and going to theme settings. From here you'll also see Space 1, 2, 3 and different themes will have a different number of spaces and different options with in each of those from the drop down. As you can see here, this space 2 has the featured news with list and articles with list. This Space 1 also does and Space 3 doesn't have the featured news and articles, instead it has sponsor and single event.

It allows you to customize the different areas of your site a little simpler and if you want to do even more you can always go in and either hand-custom program it through the theme editor and remove the space altogether to put in whatever content you would like. If you're more technical, or you can add a box and we'll cover boxes in a different video.

So we're going to go ahead and put the sponsor list back and update it, go back to our homepage and you'll see now that it's returned. To add the sponsor images and have it link, you'll see here, instructions: Adding a story and tagging it "sponsor" will have it appear as an image above.

So to add the story we will go to the content menu option, go down to Stories and click "Add." Then we can add a new sponsor. You can add a featured photo which will go inside the box and remember that there are size requirements for the different images. And if you have trouble with that we have all the images with their aspect ratios in height and width in pixels in a help file. So you'll want to make sure that you resize your photographs and images appropriately.

We'll need to tag it as a sponsor and then again we have the start and end time for when we want it to appear and when we want the sponsor image to disappear or we can have it never expire by unchecking that box.

We have our permission settings, our administrative notes and then we can add the story. And then we go back to the homepage and here we have one of our sponsors and it is linked to the link we put in so when someone clicks on it they will be taken to schipul.com.

So now you've learned a little bit more about editing content on your site with our spaces on the homepage and adding additional stories with tags. We'll cover more of this material inside help files and additional videos coming up, so I hope you're having fun setting up your Tendenci Community site.